Scroogle - bookmarkable, pretty, cache links
Privacy-assured web searching was never prettier or more usable!
There are three main features provided here:
- Bookmarkable URLs when in SSL mode (but still safe, secure, and private).
- Display beautified, now it looks almost exactly like Google (see screenshots).
- Helper links added for cache, similar links, history, and translations (based on the link's country code).
A quick overview of Scroogle - this is an anonymizer service which prevents Google, Inc. from connecting your searches to you. They wipe logs religiously, there are no cookies, etc. Using SSL also means nobody can read your traffic and note your search queries. Learn more at www.scroogle.org or the Electronic Privacy Information Center's Google FAQ.
If using SSL, further searches should be SSL. Also, SSL makes it safe to use GET (the referring URL is not sent via SSL), which makes it easier to bookmark and share search links, recover crashed sessions, and find old searches in your browser history, all with no risk to your privacy. If not using SSL, it is not safe to use GET. We use POST to ensure privacy.
You can change your search-bar to use Scroogle by clicking on Scroogle SSL on the Mycroft Project, after which you can make it your default search by going to about:config and filtering for search., then copying the string for browser.search.selectedEngine to browser.search.defaultenginename.
If you're like me, you consider the search bar redundant; you can use the "quick search" function of bookmark shortcuts instead: Add a bookmark to https://ssl.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbw.cgi?Gw=%s and give the bookmark a keyword like "s" or "search" for quick searching, so that you can type "s this is a search query" into your location bar (you can then remove the search bar in favor of a wider location bar).
Search w/o script 
Search with script
Compare to Google 
Update 2008-03-20: Better rendering of pages with no hits. Purely cosmetic.
Update 2008-09-16: Added cache links for full Google mimicry.
Update 2008-09-23: Big improvement of insertion code and Google look-and-feel, market-watch image.
Update 2008-09-24,25: Folded in suggestions implemented in icepick's fork, added "Similar Pages" (like Google), "History" (like CustomizeGoogle), removed extra indentation and numbering, other minor tweaks.
Update 2008-10-03: Indentation for subsequent hits within the same domain (like Google), PDF support (as requested by icepick) via Flash reader PdfMeNot and Google (I renamed the standard cache link), PDF links now have icons. I also bumped the license to AGPLv3.
Update 2008-10-10: Translation now included! Also improved highlighting color, added acknowledgment of other non-browser-friendly formats (now featuring PDF, RTF, DOC, and PPT). I decided PDF was by far the most popular, so only it gets an icon (unless there is other demand); it's hard to find an icon that is compatible with the (A)GPL, and it might take up too much space. Also, I think Granz banned me from scroogle for my constant refreshing while writing this script, so the version gets bumped up to 1.0 and I won't be doing much more for a while. I'll update the screenshots next week. For now, here's a quick demo of the new features:
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Items cached by PdfMeNot are indeed stored indefinitely, however, used in conjunction with Scroogle, I find limited reason for concern. One assumes that all results displayed are public and cached by multiple entities - one more would seem insignificant. The local upload feature, on the other hand, I believe is of far more concern.
As always, cheers for the update for this useful script. Using your latest version, I will now apply my (increasingly limited) tweaks to update my "fork".
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PdfMeNot is an interesting flash-based PDF viewer ... they have no privacy policy, and it doesn't say what they do with their cached copies, so I'm a bit wary (after all, this is why we use Scroogle over Google!) but I've added it regardless. I also updated the link text for Google's cache on PDF items. See the Update section above for more details.
To-do: PDF is just one format Google parses and caches as HTML. I'll have to come back and do PPT, RTF, and DOC (any others?) later. I can't keep adding icons as they will take up too much disk space, so I may revert back to using [PDF] the way Google does.
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Cheers for the feedback!
Your update is going to drive me out of the forking business. :-P
Before I synchronise with your code, I figured I'd offer my next idea as suggestions to you first. Quite simply, when a returned result is a PDF, a link to view using PdfMeNot, as well as Google's 'view as HTML' is added - with both links having some form of increased visibility.
It should be noted that the Google Cache and 'View as HTML' URLs are identical if you're into space-saving.
Thanks, and I look forward to whatever else you might come up with in the future.